Scheduling a vacation for the high season sometimes can be a headache, especially in finding the right place
to stay in.

Planning way ahead is the key for a perfect holiday.

One of the latest websites for globetrotters to explore when planning vacation is pegipegi.com, an online hotel booking service covering more than 700 hotels and villas in dozens of cities across the country.

Designed to serve both local and international travelers on business or holiday travel, the website claims that it can instantly present the instant availability of all hotels and villas in Indonesia, along with complete tourism destination guides.

“We have already talked with several airlines to connect their systems with ours to allow the customers to book their tickets. We also plan to create travel packages,” pegipegi.com CEO Davy Makimian said.

Pegipegi.com has been launched under the name of PT Go Online Destination (GOLD) Co. Ltd., a partnership between PT Alternative Media Group (AMG) Co. Ltd., PT Alternative Vision Indonesia (Altavindo) Co. Ltd. and Recruit Co. Ltd, Japan.

“Travel is a very huge industry in Japan — almost US$40 billion a year in hotel bookings alone,” Recruit Co. Ltd. Japan CEO Hisayuki Idekoba told The Jakarta Post.

Idekoba says that in the early days when Recruit Co. launched jalan.net, there were only an average of 100 bookings. After 12 years, they book an average of 80,000 to 100,000 reservations through the portal every day.

“Our target is that in three years we can achieve 100,000 bookings and traffic of 4 million clicks on the website,” says Davy.

He said the target was made after considering Indonesia’s lack of infrastructure, which is unlike that in Jakarta. Moreover, Internet accessibility penetrated the whole Japan a long way back.

Altavindo’s chief executive officer, Kevin Yaphon Sanjoto, says that the number of credit cards, which is the easiest method of payment, is another challenge.

In Japan, he said there are some 150 million credit card users out of its 110 million people, while Indonesia only has some 15 million credit card users out of its 240 million people.

“Although the number [of credit card users] is still a few, actually it grows quickly. The growth is estimated at 20 percent annually here in Indonesia,” Kevin says.

Tourism and Creative Economy Minister Mari Elka Pangestu, who attended the website’s launch, expressed her support of the company, saying the business would flourish if it was attached to related business in the creative industry.

With Internet penetration at 11 percent, or 40 million users, across the country, she said increased accessibility offered a huge business potential although currently, not many people engaged in online business or e-commerce.

Mari did not recall the percentage but estimated around 10 percent of local Internet users have made online purchases worth Rp 3.7 billion.

The company, she said, could support the ministry’s plan to raise the number of tourists.

The ministry, she said, recorded 245 million domestic trips last year and set the target for 260 million this year.

For foreign travelers, the ministry has recorded some 6 million trips last year and aims to get 10 million trips in 2012.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/06/03/pegipegicom-traveling-easy-and-hassle-free.html

News from the Jakarta Post

E-commerce websites have to turn to relatively high-cost television advertisements to drive traffic, indicating not only the staying power of television in reaching the masses, but also the stronger finance of e-commerce startups.

Jullian Gafar, director of Berniaga.com, said that the online shop decided on television advertisements primarily to garner users beyond the Internet community who have been exposed to online advertisements.

“Originally, we had no plans to place advertisements on television. As time passed, however, we felt that if we advertised through online media only, our reach was limited to the online community,” he said.

Television penetration reaches 60 percent of Indonesia’s population of more than 240 million people. Internet penetration is only a third of that of television.

He added that like any product, a television campaign was necessary for promotion as well as educating people regarding online shopping.

Jullian added that although Berniaga had always done heavy campaigns online, the television campaign, coupled with the radio campaign, now absorbs around two-thirds of the marketing budget.

“Media buying is ridiculously expensive. However, we are spending large amounts of money on the potential of having people spend on our website,” he said while declining to reveal the budget spent on buying television advertisement spots.

In one month, the company buys almost 1,000 mostly prime time spots spread across six channels, especially channels and programs focused on young audiences.

Certain television channels charge at least Rp 30 million for a 30 second television spot. However, the production of a 30 second television advertisement could cost Rp 500 million, or more.

He pointed out that the television campaign, which started early this year, had increased traffic to the website.

“At the end of December, we had, let’s say, around 2 million visits, with 1.8 million unique visitors,” he said.

Visits went up by about 50 percent after the television campaign, prompting him to say that “traditional media, especially television, works”.

However, Arnold Sebastian Egg, the co-founder of another e-commerce site Tokobagus.com, said that websites had to consider their size before deciding to pour money into a television campaign.

Tokobagus had been around roughly six years before it decided to conduct a television campaign, which started late last year.

According to Arnold, the company measured their performance, such as visitor analytics and growth targets, before deciding that television was a way of achieving these targets.

“The timing should be precise because moving to television advertisements too fast could ruin the company,” he said, adding that smaller e-commerce websites could increase traffic through better online campaigns.

He added that they adjusted the volume of their television campaign based on fluctuations on business conditions.

“We are now getting a good return [from television campaigns] so we will continue with it. But we do not know when we will do this,” he said.

William Tanuwijaya, the co-founder of Tokopedia.com, said that they had no plans for a television campaign because their budget was not heavily allocated toward marketing.

“Over the last two years, we have still been focusing on developing our product,” he said regarding his website, which was launched in 2009.

Andi S. Boediman, a venture capitalist at IdeoSource, pointed out that e-commerce websites that did television campaigns were those that needed to attract people to place advertisements on the website.

Both Tokobagus and Berniaga act as meeting places between buyers and sellers, whereby sellers could place small advertisements of the merchandise they sell.

The websites currently do not charge sellers for the advertisements, but plan to do so after they reach a certain mass of both sellers and buyers visiting the sites.

“They [sites] are competing with newspapers and other print media, so they have to build a strong awareness [for their sites],” he said.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/06/18/startups-counting-tv-ads-drive-traffic.html

News from the Jakarta Post

The Sinar Mas Group, in cooperation with Excite Japan, a subsidiary of Japan’s giant Itochu Corporation, launched an internet advertising site Excite Point on Wednesday in response to the rapidly growing e-commerce sector in Indonesia .

As an interactive advertising website, Excite Point offers points to visitors who participate in the activities of companies advertising on the excite.co.id website, such as downloading content, making purchases and writing product reviews. Visitors to the site can redeem their collected points for products or phone credit.

Points can be exchanged into mobile phone credit provided by Smart Fren, the telecommunications subsidiary of Sinar Mas.

Excite Japan’s CEO, Kiyoshi Imagawa, said that tapping into Indonesia’s booming market was one of the firm’s strategies to survive the current global economic turmoil.

“Looking back, the reason we were able to survive the ups and downs in the Japanese market was due to our culture of adopting cutting-edge technology and cultivating new markets,” he said during the portal’s launch in Jakarta.

Itochu’s chief operating officer, Shunuke Noda, said Excite Point would support the firm’s business expansion in Southeast Asia.

Sinar Mas managing director G. Sulistiyanto said the point-reward website had huge potential to flourish in Indonesia, where interest in the Internet was growing.

Last year, the number of Internet users in Indonesia grew by 30.95 percent to 55 million from 42 million in 2010, according to MarkPlus Insight research.

Google has said that the annual contribution of Internet businesses to gross domestic product (GDP) will likely jump from the current 1.6 percent, or around US$13.3 billion, to at least 2.5 percent by 2016.

Imagawa said the website was aiming to attract three million users and 50 advertising companies by the end of this year.

Currently, about 10 companies, mostly Sinar Mas subsidiaries, have placed advertisements on the site.

“This portal will be supported by Sinar Mas’ six business lines, especially by our telecommunications provider, Smart Fren,” said Sulistiyanto.

Sulistiyanto hoped that the 300,000 Sinar Mas employees would support the site’s growth by being initial users.

Excite is one of Japan’s leading portals, community and Internet service providers, attracting 35 million hits per month. The company, founded in 1997, is listed on Japan’s JASDAQ bourse.

Its parent company, Itochu, is one of the world’s largest general trading companies, operating in various sectors, including energy, food, metals, machinery and information and telecommunications.

The Osaka-based firm, which has 130 bases in 66 countries, yielded $150 billion in total trading transactions and $53 billion in revenue in the fiscal year 2011. (yps)

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/06/07/sinar-mas-enters-online-business.html

News from the Jakarta Post

Indonesia will probably have to wait for another six years before it can make the transition from the analog television broadcasting system to digital, Communications and Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring said on Monday.

Tifatul said that Indonesia would likely fail to meet the 2015 deadline for the digital transition as a majority of the country’s population would not be able to simultaneously replace their analog televisions with digital sets.

“We need at least until 2018 for the people to change their television sets from analog to digital,” Tifatul said on Monday in a conference on the transition to digital television.

Tifatul said that the challenge would be to expect 50 million television set-owning households to simultaneously buy a new digital set or install a digital converter for their analog television set. He added that with digital technology, viewers would get better display resolution and stable transmission.

The digital transition process is expected to take place first in Java and Riau this year and will wrap up in 2018.

The digital transition is part of a global plan to implement the Geneva Frequency Plan Agreement which was agreed in the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) summit in 2006 in Switzerland.

The summit mandated that by June 17, 2015, nations across the globe will have migrated from analog to digital broadcasting systems. Currently 80 percent of the countries in the world have gone digital.

Indonesia’s sheer population size will likely hamper the implementation of the global plan. Tifatul said that the government had also built infrastructure to make the transition.

“To keep up with the global trends, we have to prepare the infrastructure first and that requires some time.”

Tifatul said that his ministry would provide Rp 300 billion (US$32 million) to purchase 1 million digital converter boxes for the country’s poor in 2013.

The digital converter will be available for Rp 300,000 which is the price difference between an analog and digital television set.

To broadcast digital programs, television stations need to have their audio and video transmission digitally processed and transferred through a multiplexed signal, in contrast to the totally analog programs which are carried by separated signals. (aml)

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/06/12/ri-not-ready-digital-television-2015.html

News from the Jakarta Post

On May 9, at around 8:30 in the morning, I and three colleagues from The Jakarta Post Foundation were treated to the clear, deep tones of a young high school student from SMK Roudlotul Mubtadiin pesantren (Islamic boarding school) in Balekambang village in Jepara, Central Java, who welcomed us with a sung recitation from the Koran.

We were there as part of a week-long visit to Semarang, the capital of Central Java province, and its surrounding areas to bring the foundation’s Newspaper in Education (NIE) program to teachers and students of English at a number of schools in the district.

The NIE program was originally established by The New York Times in the 1930s, since which time newspapers and periodicals from around the world have joined the program, the aim of which is to encourage schools to use print media as a resource in the educational development of their students.

Indonesia first joined the NIE program in 2003 and now 32 daily newspapers and weekly publications across the country are members of the international NIE Institute. The Jakarta Post joined the program in 2007 and was the first newspaper in Indonesia to launch an English-language NIE program.

In December 2011, a memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed between The Jakarta Post Foundation and the Education and Culture Ministry with the aim of furthering English skills among students at 100 junior high and senior high schools across nine provinces — Bali, Central Java, East Java, East Kalimantan, Jakarta, North Sumatra, Riau, West Java and Yogyakarta — in 2012. With generous financial support from our program’s sponsor, the oil giant PT Chevron Pacific Indonesia, this goal is well on the way to being achieved.

Our visit in May to the pesantren in Jepara constituted just one of several schools visited in Central Java. Jepara, a small town located about 76 kilometers from Semarang, is renowned for its furniture industry, especially the production of teak wood.

As we made our way by car onto the small lanes leading toward Balekambang village, we attracted a degree of attention from interested locals, curious to know what brought us to their secluded, rural idyll. Upon reaching the front gates of the Islamic school, we discovered several attractive, modern-looking school buildings — funded by AusAID (Australian Government Overseas Aid Program) — that were laid out as if forming the four sides of a square and rising at a sharp incline up a steep bank, with a wide expanse of lush green grass in the middle.

Founded in 1884, with around 2,000 students in total, the school is the oldest pesantren in Jepara. It is a vocational school, offering classes in electronics, automotives, fashion and information communication technology (ICT). Although the school remains faithful to its Islamic roots, it does not try to shut itself off from the world outside its gates. On the contrary, it has become well-known as a center of learning that successfully embraces both its religious practices and openness to the modern world, which its students will enter when they graduate.

After first being welcomed by the school’s principal, Pak Miskhahuddin, we made our way along the concrete paths that ran alongside each of the classrooms heading toward one of the buildings, situated at the top of the bank, which had been allocated for the workshop. Apart from boasting some beautiful views of the surrounding countryside, the classroom was light, airy and fresh – a welcome sight following our more than two-hour drive that morning from Semarang.

Inside, we found 60 students – girls and boys – all smartly dressed and patiently waiting for us, seated in groups of six around 10 large wooden tables. There were, of course, indications that this was a religious school; for instance, all the female students were wearing hijab, while the boys wore peci or songkok (cone-shaped, black felt caps) and, unlike in the other schools we visited that week, the girls and boys were separated so that girls worked together in their own groups and the boys the same.

Aside from these observances, however, the atmosphere at the school was not as formal or serious as one might have anticipated. In fact, it was refreshingly relaxed due in no small part to the influence by Pak Miskhahuddin, who had a ready smile both for us and his students and an open, generous nature.

During his welcome speech in front of the class, it was quite obvious that he enjoys a good humored, positive relationship with his young charges, as was indicated by a few jokes he shared, which were greatly enjoyed by the students.

The workshop itself was very well received, with the students, who were shy at first, slowly coming out of their shells and entering into the exercises with a great deal of enthusiasm. When the workshop had ended and we were preparing to leave and make our way back to Semarang, Pak Miskhahuddin had one more surprise in store.

He got on his motorbike and asked us to follow him in our car. He led us to his modest house in the heart of the village, where lunch had been prepared. Rice, ikan bakar (barbequed fish), soup and vegetables, all of which had been cooked by 15 students, awaited our arrival.

We ended up staying for more than an hour, chatting about the NIE program and the pesantren with Pak Miskhahuddin and the school’s overall guide, KH. M. Ma’mun Abdullah ZA, who is a descendant of the school’s founder. The food was delicious and the hospitality shown to us was a definite highlight of the week.

It was quite obvious from the conversation we had that, despite the school’s modest surroundings, it is run by forward-thinking people who have great dreams and aspirations for the future opportunities and wellbeing of their students.

On a personal level, as an expat living in Indonesia, it was a rare privilege to be afforded the opportunity to visit this pesantren and, speaking on behalf of my colleagues who accompanied me on this trip, we were all highly impressed with both the students and their principal and would like to extend a big “thank you” for the warm welcome we received. We feel sure that under Pak Miskhahuddin and Pak Ma’mun’s guidance, the students at SMK Roudlotul Mubtadiin will go on to achieve all their hopes and ambitions.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/06/14/a-jepara-pesantren-looking-future.html-0

News from the Jakarta Post